Comment by tehjoker
2 years ago
You can't just reword things and get a better result. If there actually is an alien invasion and the earth is actually doomed, that's actually the correct headline.
Media literacy is about way more than about the wording of headlines. It's also about understanding why a headline was selected, who benefits from a story, whether the story is internally logically consistent, and why were the people quoted selected, context of the story that you wouldn't know just from reading it, etc.
I say this as someone that wrote a browser plugin to do something similar in like 2011 by screening words that indicated the headline was pointless.
I agree. Although one side effect of the Boring Report's approach that I quite like is that it also seems to make the headlines more informative.